After the Cartesian philosophy had given decisive expression to the
tendencies of modern thought, and had been developed through occasionalism
to its completion in the system of Spinoza, the line of further progress
consisted in two factors: Descartes's principles--one-sidedly rationalistic
and abstractly scientific, as they were--were, on the one hand, to be
supplemented by the addition of the empirical element which Descartes had
neglected, and, on the other, to be made available for general culture by
approximation to the interests of practical life. England, with its freer
and happier political conditions, was the best place for the accomplishment
of both ends, and Locke, a typically healthy and sober English thinker,
with a distaste for extreme views, the best adapted mind. Descartes, the
rationalist, had despised experience, and Bacon, the empiricist, had
despised mathematics; but Locke aims to show that while the reason is the
instrument of science, demonstration its form, and the realm of knowledge
wider than experience, yet this instrument and this form are dependent for
their content on a supply of material from the senses. The emphasis, it is
true, falls chiefly on the latter half of this programme, and posterity,
especially, has almost exclusively attended to the empirical side of
Locke's theory of knowledge in giving judgment concerning it.

John Locke was born at Wrington, not far from Bristol, in 1632. At Oxford
he busied himself with philosophy, natural science, and medicine, being
repelled by the Scholastic thinkers, but strongly attracted by the writings
of Descartes. In 1665 he became secretary to the English ambassador to the
Court of Brandenburg. Returning thence to Oxford he made the acquaintance
of Lord Anthony Ashley (from 1672 Earl of Shaftesbury; died in Holland
1683), who received him into his own household as a friend, physician, and
tutor to his son (the father of Shaftesbury, the moral philosopher), and
with whose varying fortunes Locke's own were henceforth to be intimately
connected. Twice he became secretary to his patron (once in 1667--with
an official secretaryship in 1672, when Shaftesbury became Lord
Chancellor--and again in 1679, when he became President of the Council),
but both times he lost his post on his friend's fall. The years 1675-79
were spent in Montpellier and Paris. In 1683 he went into voluntary exile
in Holland (where Shaftesbury had died in January of the same year), and
remained there until 1689, when the ascension of the throne by William of
Orange made it possible for him to return to England. Here he was made
Commissioner of Appeals, and, subsequently, one of the Commissioners of
Trade and Plantations (till 1700). He died in 1704 at Gates, in Essex, at
the house of Sir Francis Masham, whose wife was the daughter of Cudworth,
the philosopher.

Locke's chief work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding which had
been planned as early as 1670, was published in 1689-90, a short abstract
of it having previously appeared in French in Le Clerc's Bibliothèque
Universelle 1688. His theoretical works include, further, the two
posthumous treatises, On the Conduct of the Understanding(originally
intended for incorporation in the fourth edition of the Essay which,
however, appeared in 1700 without this chapter, which probably had proved
too extended) and the Elements of Natural Philosophy To political
and politico-economic questions Locke contributed the two Treatises on
Government 1690, and three essays on money and the coinage. In the year
1689 appeared the first of three Letters on Tolerance followed, in 1693,
by Some Thoughts on Education and, in 1695, by The Reasonableness of
Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures The collected works appeared
for the first time in 1714, and in nine volumes in 1853; the philosophical
works (edited by St. John) are given in Bonn's Standard Library
(1867-68).[1]

[Footnote 1: Lord King and Fox Bourne have written on Locke's life, 1829
and 1876. A comparison of Locke's theory of knowledge with Leibnitz's
critique was published by Hartenstein in 1865, and one by Von Benoit (prize
dissertation) in 1869, and an exposition of his theory of substance by De
Fries in 1879. Victor Cousin's Philosophie de Locke has passed through
six editions. [Among more recent English discussions reference may be made
to Green's Introduction to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature 1874 (new ed.
1890), which is a valuable critique of the line of development, Locke,
Berkeley, Hume; Fowler's Locke in the English Men of Letters, 1880; and
Fraser's Locke in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1890.--TR.]]